Forests of Belonging: Identities, Ethnicities, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin

Foreword

xiii Foreword S tudies of the relationships between ethnicity and environment, having grown and matured over several decades, have moved beyond the familiar dichotomy between positivist determinism and relativism . New scholarship observes that identities animating human group and individual behavior should be understood as dynamic and historically fashioned . Equally, the ecological conditions in which these identifications operate are now recognized as patterned by the shifting nature of nonhuman life, associated landscapes, and human entanglements in them. How, then, does an anthropologist pursue questions relating to environments and ethnic identifications? In this painstakingly researched, compassionately written, and erudite study, Stephanie Rupp suggests some very compelling ways to answer this question. Based on long and detailed fieldwork in the central African nation-state of Cameroon, Rupp presents valuable new information and refreshing new analysis of the lives of forests and their inhabitants in one of the most contested forest regions in Africa, and possibly the tropical world. For at least two hundred years, powerful nations have entered this area to mine resources, and peoples there have dealt with these intrusions to negotiate their own life paths and relations with each other in conditions of great hazard and unpredictable opportunity. Rupp takes as her central focus the dynamics of belonging and the production of social and ethnic identities in this turbulent history, demonstrating how such identities remain fluid, take particular temporarily stable forms at specific historical conjunctures, and then are remade in violent contexts of change, from colonial rule to independent nation-state formation. She discusses complex ideas with deceptive simplicity and keeps her study immersed in the lives of the people whose livelihoods, stories, memories, and suffering provide the substance for her argument. At the heart of the book, a series of compelling chapters develops important themes—marriage and kinship; lineage structures, shared work, and ritual; and the impact of commercialized farming—as the basis for building an argument about how identities become fluid and then congeal around specific concerns and conflicts. Rupp attends closely to the lives of Bangando and Baka alike, the two main groups in the central African forest zone in which she worked. Comprehending the changing social and ecological landscape in Bandango and Baka terms, Rupp has produced a sharp, elegant , and rich ethnographic account that situates the making of identity and lives in the shadow and light of historical memory and contemporary compulsions arising from commercial hunting, forest conservation, and projects of sustainable development. This is a systematic analysis of the patterns of identity change and stabilization in the context of unequal relations among southeastern Cameroonians, as well as among central Africans and colonial traders, officials, and missionaries. Apart from adding a gem to African studies, Rupp charts a new direction for the study of ecology and ethnicity anywhere in the world, and does so in lucid prose and a caring voice. K. Sivaramakrishnan Yale University August 2011 Forests of Belonging ...